Classic Love Poems
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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was an American poet and playwright and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was also known for her unconventional, bohemian lifestyle and many love affairs. English author Thomas Hardy said that America had two great attractions: The skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. One of her best-known poems is the lyrical verse First Fig from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920):
My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— it gives a lovely light!
“My Sweet Rose”
by John William Waterhouse, 1908
In 1923, after a brief courtship, Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a tall and muscular 43-year-old American importer of Dutch-Irish descent and widower. He proved to be [CLICK PHOTO FOR LARGER VIEW] an ideal husband for Millay. Intelligent, profeminist, and considerate, he did all household chores, catered to her whims, and condoned her occasional love affairs. One former lover, Alyse Powers, described Millay’s husband: “Handsome, reckless, mettlesome as a stallion breathing the first morning air, he would laugh at himself, indeed laugh at everything, with a laugh that scattered melancholy as the wind scatters the petals of the fading poppy . . . One day his house would be that of a citizen of the world, with a French butler to wait on the table and everything done with the greatest bienséance, the next the servants would have as mysteriously disappeared as bees from a deserted hive, and he would be out in the kitchen washing the dishes and whistling a haunting Slavic melody, as light-hearted as a troubadour. He had the gift of the aristocrat and could adapt himself to all circumstances . . . his blood was testy, adventurous, quixotic, and he faced life as an eagle faces its flight.”
Once More Into My Arid Days Like Dew
Once more into my arid days like dew,
Like wind from an oasis, or the sound
Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,
A treacherous messenger, the thought of you
Comes to destroy me; once more I renew
Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found
Long since to be but just one other mound
Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.
And once again, and wiser in no wise,
I chase your colored phantom on the air,
And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise
And stumble pitifully on to where,
Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,
Once more I clasp,—and there is nothing there.
Love is Not All
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Here is a Wound that Never Will Heal
Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,
Being wrought not of a dearness and a death,
But of a love turned ashes and the breath
Gone out of beauty; never again will grow
The grass on that scarred acre, though I sow
Young seed there yearly and the sky bequeath
Its friendly weathers down, far underneath
Shall be such bitterness of an old woe.
That April should be shattered by a gust,
That August should be levelled by a rain,
I can endure, and that the lifted dust
Of man should settle to the earth again;
But that a dream can die, will be a thrust
Between my ribs forever of hot pain.
Oh, Think Not I Am Faithful to a Vow
Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love’s self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now;
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger’s rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you—think not but I would!—
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
Ebb
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Lefter there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
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Good selection of poetry! Edna’s husband Eugen Boissevain was previously married to Inez Milholland, “the woman on the horse” in the famously huge suffrage parades in New York and DC in 1911-12. She died tragically in 1916. He remarried in 1923.